If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Adobe's Linux Video API Rant Extended

01-28-2010, 12:20 AM

Phoronix: Adobe's Linux Video API Rant Extended

Adobe's lead engineer for providing Flash Player support on Linux, Mike Melanson, started ranting about Linux video acceleration APIs. As many said in our forums, Melanson prefers ranting to actually improving their Linux stack with better 64-bit support, etc...

Comment

XBMC can blend UI elements on top of video and do fancy OpenGL transformations on it just fine with VDPAU. Perhaps he should look at that as a reference.

The way a normal video player would do this would be to create a subwindow of the browser window, attach the video API to that (to get the nice tear-free presentation part of it), and then use something like VdpOutputSurfaceRenderBitmapSurface to blend the (RGB) UI elements on top.

Comment

While i'm a bit sceptical of HTML5 because of the current h264 (non)support, It's still a better solution than Flash. Even if all HTML5 pages going forward were to use patent encumbered codecs, the end users could still at least play them. Flash just doesn't work right, period.

It would be great if things were all HTML5 going forward, and Gnash evolved enough to support most of the legacy pages still around. One can dream.

Comment

Additionally, Melanson claims the Linux Flash Player doesn't support the Broadcom Crystal HD co-processor yet (but the Windows Flash Player does) as the Linux drivers are not ready. The Crystal HD Linux drivers are open-source and ready and the XBMC project has already implemented 1080p video decoding support using this Broadcom hardware on an open-source stack.

lol, I pointed this out to his "blog" (as well as some other corrections) but not surprisingly , my comment wasn't "approved".

Comment

lol, I pointed this out to his "blog" (as well as some other corrections) but not surprisingly , my comment wasn't "approved".

The other claims are wrong too. All Linux drivers but IEGD offer a means to get decoded frames out of the GPU. VA-API and VDPAU are both suitable in a way to avoid this retrieval of decoded frames (VA subpictures / VDPAU layers). The concepts for that are rather simple, but the implementation is probably a little less trivial depending on the vector graphics rendering engine used.